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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.

Today I'm actually going to turn the podcast over to our editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius

who recently sat down with Rob Cross, a professor at the University

of Virginia's McIntyre School of Commerce, to talk about Rob's article Collaborative

Overload. This is an article that we at

HPR found almost depressingly popular. Clearly it spoke to a lot of people who

just feel like they're being asked to do too much at work with too many people.

So without further ado, let's hear their conversation.

Thank you for being here with us.

No, thank you so much for the time.

So let's step back first for a second. Is what apparently we're all feeling true?

Is collaboration really on the rise so our work shows

that it it certainly is in a pretty spectacular way overall we've been at the focus of

analyzing collaboration and informal networks for about 20 years now,

starting initially with a research group at IBM and then through two consortia here at the University

of Virginia.

We've worked with hundreds of organizations

and very systematically you can see in that data

...